Hkdt THIRD LETTER TO ARCHDEACON SINGLETON. BY THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH. Secant) (ZBtiitian» London: LONGMAN, ORME, BROWN, GREEN, & LONGMANS, PAXEBNOSTER-ROW. 1839. hi I THIRD LETTER, Sfc, My DEAR Sir, I HOPE this is the last letter you will receive from me on Church matters. I am tired of the subject ; so are you ; so is every body. In spite of many Bishops' charges, I am unbroken ; and remain entirely of the same opinion as I was two or three years since, — that the mutilation of Deans and Chapters is a rash, foolish, and imprudent measure. I do not think the Charge of the Bishop of London successful, in combating those argu ments which have been used •. against the im pending Dean, and Chapter Bill ; but it is quiet, gentlemanlike, temperate, and written in a man ner which entirely becomes the high office, and character which he bears. A 2 I agree with him in saying that the Plurality and Residence Bill is, upon the whole, a very good bill ; — nobody, however, knows better than the Bishop of London the various changes it has undergone, and the improvements it has received. I could point out fourteen or fifteen very material alterations for the better since it came out of the hands of the Commission, and all hearing materially upon the happiness and comfort of the parochial Clergy. I will mention only a few : — the Bill, as originally introduced, gave the Bishop a power, when he considered the duties of the parish to be improperly per formed, to suspend the Clergyman and appoint a Curate with a salary. Some impious person thought it not impossible that occasionally such a power might be maliciously, and vindictively exercised, and that some check to it should be admitted into the Bill ; accordingly, under the existing act, an Ecclesiastical Jury is to be sum moned, and into that jury the defendant Clergy man may introduce a friend of his own. If a Clergyman from illness or any other overwhelming necessity, was prevented from having two services, he was exposed to an information, and penalty. In answering the Bishop, he was subjected to two opposite sets of penalties — the one for saying Yes ; the other for saying No : he was amenable to the needless and impertinent scrutiny of a rural Dean before he was exposed to the scrutiny of the Bishop. Curates might be forced upon him by subscribing parishioners, and the certainty of a schism established in the parish ; a curate might have been forced upon present incum bents by the Bishop without any complaint made ; upon men who took, or, perhaps, bought, their livings under very different laws ; — aU these acts of injustice are done away with, but it is not to the credit of the framers of the BiU that they were ever admitted, and they com pletely justify the opposition with which the Bill was received by me and by others. I add, however, with great pleasure, that, when these and other objections were made, they were heard with candour, and promised to be remedied by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London and Lord John Russell. A 3 I have spoken of the power to issue a Com mission to inquire iqto the wellbeing of any parish: a vindictive and malicious Bishop, might, it is true, convert this, which was in tended for the protection, to the oppression of the Clergy — afraid to dispossess a Clergyman of his own authority, he might attempt to do the same thing under the cover of a jury of his ecclesiastical creatures. But I can hardly conceive such baseness in the Prelate, or such infamous subserviency in the agents. An honest and respectable Bishop will remember that tjie very issue of such a Commission is a serious slur upon the character of a Clergyman ; he will do all he can to prevent it by private monition and remonstrance ; and if driven to such an act of power, he wUl of course state to the accused Clergyman the subjects of accusation, the names of his accusers, and give him ample time for his defence. If upon anonymous accusation he subjects a Clergyman to such an investigation or refuses to him any advantage which the law gives to every accused person, he is an infamous, degraded, and scandalous tyrant : but I cannot believe there is such a man to be found upon the bench. There is in this new Bill a very humane clause^ (though not introduced by the Commis sion,) enabling the widow of the deceased clergy man to retain possession of the parsonage house for two months after the death of the In cumbent. It ought, in fairness, to be extended to the heirs, executors, and administrators of the Incumbent. It is a great hardship that a family settled in a parish for fifty years perhaps, should be torn up by the roots in eight or ten days : and the interval of two months allowing time for repairs, might put to rest many questions of dilapidation. To the Bishop's power of intruding a Curate without any complaint on the part of the parish that the duty has been inadequately performed, I retain the same objections as before. It is a power which without this condition will be un fairly and partially exercised. The first object I admit is not the provision of the Clergyman, but the care of the parish ; but one way of A 4 taking care of parishes is to take care that Clergy men are not treated with tyranny, partiality, and injustice : and the best way of effecting this is to remember that their superiors have the same human passions as other people 5 and not to trust them with a power which may be so grossly abused, and which (incredible as the Bishop of London may deem it) has heen, in some instances, grossly abused. I cannot imagine what the Bishop means by saying, that the members of Cathedrals do not in virtue of their office bear any part in the paro chial instruction of the people. This is a fine deceitful word, the word parochial, and eminent ly calculated to coax the public. If he means simply that cathedrals do not belong to parishes, that St. Paul's is not the parish church of Up per Puddicomb, and that the Vicar of St. Fiddle- frid does not officiate in Westminster Abbey : all this is true enough, but do they not in the most material points instruct the people precisely in the same manner as the parochial Clergy ? Are not prayers and sermons the most important means of spiritual instruction ? And are there 9 not eighteen or twenty services in every Cathe dral for one which is heard in parish churches ? I have very often counted in the afternoon of week days in St. Paul's 150 people, and on Sundays it is full to suffocation. Is all this to go for no thing ? and what right has the Bishop of London to suppose that there is not as much real piety in Cathedrals, as in the most roadless, postless, melancholy, sequestered hamlet preached to by the most provincial, sequestered bucolic Clergy man in the Queen's dominions ? A number of little children, it is true, do not repeat a catechism of which they do not compre hend a word ; but it is rather rapid and whole sale to say, that the parochial Clergy are spiritual instructors of the people, and that the cathedral Clergy are only so in a very restricted sense. I say that in the most material points and acts of instruction, they are much more laborious and incessant than any parochial Clergy. It might really be supposed from the Bishop of London's reasoning, that some other methods of instruction took place in Cathedrals than prayers and ser mons can afford; that lectures were read on 10 chemistry, or lessons given on dancing ; or that it was a Mechanics' Institute or a vast receptacle for hexameter and pentameter boys. His own most respectable Chaplain, who is often there as a member of the body, will tell him that the prayers are strictly adhered to, according to the rubric, with the difference only that the service is beautifully chanted instead of being badly read; that instead of the atrocious bawling of parish Churches, the Anthems are sung with great taste and feeling : and if the preaching is not good, it is the fault of the Bishop of London, who has the whole range of London preachers from whom to make his selection. The real fact is, that, instead of being something materially different from the parochial Clergy, as the Commissioners wish to make them, the cathedral Clergy are fellow labourers with the parochial Clergy, out working them ten to one ; but the Commission having provided snugly for the Bishops, have by the merest accident in the world entangled them selves in this quarrel with Cathedrals. " Had the question," says the Bishop, " been proposed to the religious part of the community. II Whether, if no other means were to be found, the effective cure of souls should be provided for by the total suppression of those Ecclesiastical Cor porations which have no cure of souls, nor bear any part in the parochial labours of the Clergy ; that question, I verily believe, would have been carried in the affirmative by an immense major ity of suffrages." But suppose no. other means could be found for the effective cure of souls than the suppression of Bishops, does the Bishop of London imagine that the majority of suffrages would have been less immense ? How idle to put such cases. A pious man leaves a large sum of money in Catholic times for some purposes which are su perstitious, and for others, such as preaching and reading prayers, which are applicable to all times ; the superstitious usages are abolished, the pious usages remain : now the Bishop must admit if you take half or any part of this money from Clergymen to whom it was given, and divide it for similar purposes among Clergy to whom it was not given, you deviate materially from the intentions of the founder. These 12 foundations are made in loco ; in many of them the locus was perhaps the original cause of the gift. A man who founds an alms-house at Ed monton does not mean that the poor of Totten ham should avail themselves of it ; and if he could have anticipated such a consequence, he would not have endowed any alms-house at all. Such is the respect for property that the Court of Chancery, when it becomes impracticable to carry the will of the donor into execution, always attend to the cy pres, and apply the charitable fund to a purpose as germane as possible to the in tention of thefounder; buthere whenmen of Lin coln have left to Lincoln Cathedral, and men of Hereford to Hereford, the Commissioners seize it all, melt it into a common mass, and disperse it over the kingdom. Surely the Bishop of London cannot contend that this is not a greater deviation from the will of the founder than if the same people remaining in the same place receiving all the founder gave them, and doing all things. not forbidden by the law, which the founder ordered ; were to do something more than the founder ordered, were to become the guardians of education, the counsel to the Bishop, and 18 the Curators of the Diocese in his old age and decay. The public are greater robbers and plunderers than any one in the public ; look at the whole transaction, it is a mixture of meanness and vio lence. The country choose to have an established religion, and a resident parochial Clergy, but they do not choose to build houses for their paro chial Clergy, or to pay them in many instances more than a butler or a coachman receives. How is this deficiency to be supplied ? The heads of the Church propose to this public to seize upon estates which never belonged to the public, and which were left for another purpose ; and by the seizure of these estates to save that, which ought to come out of the public purse- Suppose Parliament were to seize upon all the alms-houses in England, and apply them to the diminution of the poor-rate, what a number of ingenious arguments might be pressed into the service of this robbery: "Can any thing be more revolting than that th^ poor of Nor thumberland should be starving, while the u poor of the suburban hamlets are dividing the benefactions of the pious dead ? " W^e want for these purposes all that we can obtain from what ever sources derived." I do not deny the right of Parliament to do this, or any thing else ; but I deny that it would be expedient, because I think it better to make any sacrifices, and to endure any evil, than to gratify this rapacious spirit of plunder and confiscation. Suppose these Commissioner Prelates firm and un moved, when we were all alarmed, had told the public that the parochial Clergy were badly provided for, and that it was the duty of that public to provide a proper support for their Ministers ; — suppose the Commissioners in stead of leading them on to confiscation, had warned their fellow subjects against the base economy, and the perilous injustice of seizing on that which was not their own ; — suppose they had called for water and washed their hands, and said, "We call you all to witness that we are in nocent of this great ruin ; "—does the Bishop of London imagine that the Prelates who made such a stand would have gone down to posterity less respected and less revered than those men upon 15 whose tombs it must (after all the enumeration of their virtues) be written, that under their auspices and hy their counsels the destruction of the English Church began. Pity that the Archbishop of Canterbury had not retained those feelings, when, at the first meeting of Bishops; the Bishop of London proposed this holy innovation upon Cathedrals, and the head of our Church declared with vehemence and indignation that nothing in the earth would induce him to consent to it. Si mens non laeva fuisset, Trqjaque nunc stares, Priamique arx alta maneres. "But," says the Lord Bishop of London, " you admit the principle of confiscation by proposing the confiscation and partition of Prebends in the possession of non-residents." I am thinking of something else, and I see all of a sudden a great blaze of light ; I behold a great num ber of gentlemen in short aprons, neat purple coats, and gold buckles, rushing about with torches in their hands, calling each other " my lord," and setting fire to all the rooms in the house, and the people below delighted with the com bustion: finding it impossible to turn them from their purpose, and finding that they are all what 1(5 they are, by divine permission ; I endeavour to direct theii; holy innovations into another chan nel; and I say to them, "My Lords, had not you better set fire to the out of door offices, to the barns and tables, and spare this fine library and. this noble drawing-room? Yonder are several cow-houses of which no use is made ; pray direct your fury against them, and leave this beautiful and venerable mansion as you found it." If I address the divinely permitted in this manner, has the Bishop of London any right to call me a brother incendiary ? Our holy innovator, the Bishop of London, has drawn a very affecting picture of sheep having no shepherd, and of mUlions who have no spiritual food ¦¦ our wants, he says, are most im perious ; even if we were to tax large livings we must still have the money of the Cathedrals : no plea wiU exempt you, nothing can stop us, for the formation of benefices, and the endow ment of new ones. We want (and he prints it in italics) for these purposes " all that we can obtain from whatever sources derived." I never remember to have been more alarmed in my life 17 Ihan by this passage. I said tb myself, the necessities of the Church have got such complete hold of the imagination of this energetic Prelate, who is so captivated by the holiness of his inno vations, that all grades and orders of the Church and all present and future interests will be sacri ficed to it. I immediately rushed to the acts of Parliament which I always have under my pillow to see at once the worst of what had happened. I found present revenues of the Bishops all safe ; that is some comfort, I said to myself: Canterbury, 24,000 or 25,000/. per annum ; London, 18,000 or 20,000. I began to feel some comfort : "things are not so bad ; the Bishops do not mean to sa crifice to sheepMnd shepherds' money their present revenues ; the Bishop of London is less violent and headstrong than I thought he would be." I looked a little further and found that 15,000/. per annum is allotted to the future Archbishop of Canterbury, 10,000/. to the Bishop of London, 8000/. to Durham, and 8000/. each to Winchester and Ely. " Nothing oi sheep and shepherd in all this," I exclaimed, and felt still more comforted. It was not till after the Bishops were taken care of, and the revenues of the Cathedrals came into B 18 fuU view, that I saw the perfect development of the sheep and shepherd principle, the deep and heartfelt compassion for spiritual labourers, and that inward gi'oaning for the destitute state of the Church, and that firm purpose, printed in italics, of taking for these purposes all that could he obtained from whatever source derived; and even in this delicious rummage of Cathedral property, where all the fine church feelings of the Bishop's heart could be indulged without costing the poor sufferer a penny, stalls for Archdeacons in Lincoln and St. Paul's are, to the amount of 2000/. per annum, taken from the sheep and shepherd fund, and the patronage of them divided between two commissioners, the Bishop of London, and the Bishop of Lincoln, instead of being paid to additional labourers in the Vineyard. Has there been any difficulty, I would ask, in procuring Archdeacons upon the very moderate pay they now receive? Can any Clergymen be more thoroughly respectable than the present Archdeacons in the see of London ? but men bearing such an office in the Church, it may be 19 said, should be highly paid, and Archbishops who could very well keep up their dignity upon 7000/. per annum, are to be allowed 15,000/. I make no objection to all this ; but then what becomes of all these heart-rending phrases of sheep and shepherd, and drooping vineyards and flocks without spiritual, consolation? The Bishop's argument is, that the superfluous must give way to the necessary ; but in fighting, the Bishop should take great care that his cannons are not seized, and turned against himself. He has awarded to the Bishops of England a superfluity as great as that which he intends to take from the Cathedrals ; and then when he legislates for an order to which he does not belong, begins to remember the dis tresses of the lower Clergy, paints them with all the colours of impassioned eloquence, and informs the Cathedral institutions that he must have every farthing he can lay his hand upon. Is not this as if one affected powerfully by a charity sermon were to put his hands in another* man's pocket, and cast, from what he had ex tracted, a liberal contribution into the plate? ' B 2' 20 I beg not to be mistaken ; I am very far from considering the Bishop of London as a sordid and interested person : but this is a complete in stance of how the best of men deceive them selves, where their interests are concerned. I have no doubt the Bishop firmly imagined he was doing his duty ; but there should have been men of all grades in the Commission, some one to say a word for Cathedrals and against Bishops. The Bishop says, " his antagonists have al lowed three Canons to be sufficient for St. Paul's, and therefore four must be sufficient for other Cathedrals." Sufficient to read the prayers and preach the sermons, certainly, and so would one be ; but not sufficient to excite by the hope of increased rank and wealth, eleven thousand parochial Clergy. The most important and cogent arguments against the Dean and Chapter confiscations are past over in silence in the Bishops' Charge. This, in reasonirig, is always the wisest and most convenient plan, and which all young 21 Bishops should imitate after the manner of this wary polemic. I object to the confiscation because it will throw a great deal more of capital out of the parochial Church than it will bring into it. I am very sorry to come forward with so homely an argument, which shocks so many Clergymen, and particularly those with the largest incomes, and the best Bishoprics; but the truth is, the greater number of cler gymen go into the Church in order that they may derive a comfortable income from the church. Such men intend to do their duty^ and they do it ; but the duty is, however, not the motive, but the adjunct. If I was writing in gala and parade, I would not hold this lan guage ; but we are in earnest, and on business ; and as very rash and hasty changes are founded upon contrary suppositions of the pure dis interestedness and perfect inattention to tem porals in the Clergy, we must get down at once to the solid rock without heeding how we disturb the turf and the flowers above. The parochial Clergy maintain their present decent appearance quite as much by their owij capital as by the income they derive from the Church. I will B 3 22 now state the income and capital of seven Cler gymen, taken promiscuously in this neighbour hood : — No. 1. Living 200/., Capital 12,000/.; No. 2. Living 800/., Capital 15,000/. ; No. 3. Liv ing 500/., Capital 12,000/. ; No. 4. Living 150/., Capital 10,000/. ; No. 5. Living 800/., Capital 12,000/.; No. 6. Living 150/., Capital 1000/. ; No. 7. Living 600/., Capital 16,000/. I have dili gently inquired into the circumstances of seven Unitarian and Wesleyan ministers, and I ques tion much if the whole seven could make up 6000/. between them ; and the zeal of enthu siasm of this last division is certainly not inferior to that of the former. Now here is a capital of 72,000/. carried into the Church, which the confiscations of the Commissioners would force out of it, by taking away the good things which were the temptation to its introduction. So that by the old plan of paying by lottery instead of giving a proper competence to each, not only do you obtain, a parochial Clergy upon much cheaper terms ; but from the gambling propensi ties of human nature, and the irresistible tend ency to hope that they shall gain the great nrizes, you tempt men into your service who 23 keep up their credit and yours, not by your allowance, but by their own capital, and to de stroy this wise and well-working arrangement, a great number of Bishops, Marquisses, and John RusseUs, are huddled into a chamber, and after proposing a scheme which will turn the English Church into a collection of consecrated beggars, we are informed by the Bishop of London — that it is an Holy Innovation. I have no manner of doubt, that the immediate effect of passing the Dean and Chapter Bill will be, that a great number of fathers and uncles, judging, and properly judging, that the Church is a very altered and deteriorated profession, will turn the industry and capital of their elives into another channel. My friend, Robert Eden, says " this is of the earth earthy :" be it so ; I cannot help it, I paint mankind as I find them, and am not answerable for their' defects. When an argument taken from real life, and the actual condition of the world is brought among the shadowy discussions of ec clesiastics, it always occasions terror and dismay ; B 4 24 it is like :^neas stepping into Charon's boat, which carried only ghosts and spirits. Gemuit sub ponders cymba Sutilis. The whole plan of the Bishop of London is a ptochogony — a generation of beggars. He pur poses, out of the spoils of the Cathedral, to create a thousand livings, and to give to the thousand Clergymen 130/. per annum each : — a Christian Bishop proposing, in cold blood, to create a thou sand livings of 130/. per annum each; to call into existence a thousand of the most unhappy men on the face of the earth, — the sons of the poor, without hope, without the assistance of private fortune, chained to the soil, ashamed to live with their inferiors, unfit for the society of the better classes, and dragging about the English curse of poverty without the smallest hope that they can ever shake it off: at present, such livings are filled by young men who have better hopes — who have reason to expect good pro perty — who look forward to a College or a family living— who are the sons of men of some substance, and hope so to pass on to something better — who exist under the delusion of being 25 hereafter Deans and Prebendaries — who are paid once by money and three times by hope. Will the Bishop of London promise to the progeny of any of these thousand victims of the Holy In- novation that, if they behave well, one of them shall have his butler's place ; another take care of the cedars and hyssops of his garden? Will betake their daughters for his nursery-maids ; and may some of the sons of these " labourers of the vine yard" hope one day to ride the leaders from St. James's to Fulham ? Here is hope — here is room for ambition — a field for genius, and a ray of amelioration ! If these beautiful feelings of compassion are throbbing under the cassock of the Bishop, he ought, in common justice to himself, to make them known. If it were a scheme for giving ease and inde pendence to any large bodies of Clergymen, it might be listened to ; but the revenues of the English Church are such as to render this wholly and entirely out of the question. If you place a man in a village in the country ; require that he should be of good manners and well edu cated; that his habits and appearance should be 26 above those of the farmers to whom he preaches, if he has nothing else to expect (as would be the case in a Church of equal division) ; and if upon his village income he is to support a wife and educate a family without any power of making himself known in a remote and solitary situation, such a person ought to receive 500/. per annum, and be furnished with a house. There are about 10,700 parishes in England and Wales, whose average income is 285/. per annum. Now, to provide these incumbents with decent houses, to keep them in repair, and to raise the income of the incumbent to 500/. per an num, would require (if all the incomes of the Bishops, Deans, and Chapters of separate dig nitaries, of sinecure rectories, were confiscated, and if the excess of all the livings in Eng land above 500/. per annum were added to them,) a sum of two millions and a half in addition to the present income of the whole church ; and no power on earth could persuade the present Parliament of Great Britain to grant a single shilling for that purpose. Now, is it possible to pay such a Church upon any other prin ciple than that of unequal division? The 27 proposed pillage of the Cathedral and College Churches (omitting all consideration of the separate estate of dignitaries) would amount, divided among all the Benefices of England, to about 51. 12s. 6i